Download e-book for kindle: A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Concise Companions to by Corinne Saunders

This concise spouse offers a succinct creation to Chaucer’s significant works, the contexts within which he wrote, and to medieval inspiration extra often. Opens with a basic introductory part discussing London lifestyles and politics, books and authority, manuscripts and readers. next sections specialise in Chaucer’s significant works – the dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury stories. Essays spotlight the most important non secular, political and highbrow contexts for every significant paintings. additionally covers vital common themes, together with: medieval literary genres; dream idea; the Church; gender and sexuality; and examining Chaucer aloud. Designed in order that each one contextual essay could be learn along considered one of Chaucer’s significant works.

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Neighborhood and imperial, insular and expansive, either English but British: geographically and culturally, the ocean maintains to form altering types of Englishness. This quantity strains the various literary origins of insular identification from neighborhood groups to the whole archipelago, laying open the continuities and disruptions within the sea's courting with English identification in a British context.

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Those of his contemporaries to whom Chaucer refers also reflect the diversity of his audience and companions (Strohm 1989: 47–83). In three of his short poems Chaucer mentions courtiers who seem to have been his friends: Sir Philippe de la Vache (in ‘Truth’), Henry Scogan (in ‘Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan’) and Sir Peter Bukton (in ‘Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton’). Vache was a chamber knight who served under Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV, Scogan a squire in the king’s household who later became tutor to the sons of Henry IV, and Bukton a steward to Henry of Derby (later Henry IV) (Pearsall 1992: 181–5).

His father certainly did business with Italian merchants. Chaucer was then able to go to Italy because he had the favour of the court and was a trusted royal servant. ) Chaucer’s trade background and his acceptability to the royal family thus both contributed to his opportunity to gain Italian manuscripts and to engage fully with Italian literature. Chaucer’s literary abilities were similarly various: he was just as competent at deploying bourgeois language or at inventing conversa20 Politics and London Life tion as he was at writing stylized courtly verse and formal rhetorical speeches.